I have a cartoon about Twitter in today's Wall Street Journal. Above is the version that I mailed in.Upon getting the OK, I received notes to make the fellow ("Jon Dailey") look more pleasant and make the "Never Tweeted and Proud of It" more bold. Above is a blow up of his face, and you can see the look of grim determination that Mr. Dailey has about never ever ever no way in God's green Earth is he EVER using Twitter on his puss. I was sorry to lose that look.

Here are the stats. It was a long journey to print, over a year, from conception to sale to print:

Rejected by Harvard Business Review, Reader's Digest, The New Yorker. It was held by the Wall Street Journal on December 30, 2009. They bought it February 10, 2010. It ran in the paper today, November 30, 2010.

And above is the redrawn published version. His face is more pleasant. I took out trees in the background in favor of making the monument (and lettering) larger. "Jon Dailey" was a name I plucked out of thin air. I don't know anyone by that name. I wanted it specific (no "John Smith") and not funny on its own (no "Og Ogleby"). Now, I bet I get contacted by a couple of Jon Daileys!

Maybe you know this and maybe it's news to you, but actor Martin Landau was a staff cartoonist at the New York Daily News in the 1940s. He was just a kid, assisting other cartoonists (the Daily News' theatrical caricaturist Horace Knight and, later on, THE GUMPS cartoonist Gus Edson) and thinking that he would maybe be a pro one day. Actually, he was; he assisted Edson for several years in the late 1940s, graduating from drawing backgrounds and lettering to drawing THE GUMPS Sunday pages.

Bhob Stewart recounts the cartoonist years of Martin Landau, complete with some screen captures of Mr. Landau drawing for the 2008 film LOVELY, STILL, and some GUMPS scans. Above: a close up of Mr. Landau drawing from the beginning of the movie.

On September 2, 2010, Mr. Landau gave an interview to Neal Conan on NPR's Talk of the Nation program (full audio here). While promoting LOVELY, STILL, he recounted his cartooning days at The Daily News:

CONAN: There is a part in the film you play, a character who is involved. We see him sketching at first, later painting. And that's you. You did that, right?

Mr. LANDAU: Well, I did that professionally, actually. I mean, I started on The New York Daily News as a kid when I was 17 years old, as a cartoonist and illustrator, and I was being groomed to be the theatrical caricaturist. And I know if I got that job, I'd never quit. So I quit.

(Soundbite of laughter)

CONAN: So you were getting offered a - you believed you were about to be offered a nice, cushy job in newspapers, and then...

Mr. LANDAU: It was a great job, actually. I'd go to opening nights, and the PR people would give me 8x10s of the dress rehearsal. And I would go home, actually - I didn't have to go to the news building - and do a drawing of the cast, which would appear in a Sunday paper. If there were two openings that week, two drawings. The old fellow, Horace Knight(ph), was an old English fellow who had that job was retiring. And I was - I had the ability to do that. So I - but I knew I wanted to go into the theater. I mean, I wanted to act. And I knew if I got that job - which was, again, a cushy job and very well-paying job, and the only - you know, I mean, my style was sort of a nouveau - art nouveau style, an art deco style, as opposed Hirschfeld's, who had a very flowing line.

CONAN: Yeah.

Mr. LANDAU: And it was a different look, but it had a look. And - but I quit. And my - you know, my family - I had to put up with a lot of - you did what?

"Cartoons as a medium, particularly political ones, occupy a curious, not quite respectable twilight place in the realm of journalism, often integral to the topography of a newspaper but also more than slightly semi-detached."

Link here. This is a shorter version of an article Mr. Rowson wrote for the British Journalism Review.